Dr. Mabuse, master of mystery a novel
an early supper an interesting medium would appear. In her trances
memories were awakened within her which referred to her very earliest
days ... to a time when the mind was not developed enough to be able to
record or describe the physical existence of the moment.
Mabuse had made the Privy Councillor’s acquaintance through a patient
of his, an aristocratic and wealthy dame, who had suffered from severe
neurosis and whom Mabuse had very successfully treated by hypnotic
suggestion. In the company were to be found not only professors, but
also authors, artists and the reputed friends of art, such as frequent
the society of the wealthy and fashionable nowadays.
Mabuse’s neighbour at the supper-table was a lady whom he recognized
with astonishment and perplexity. In the gambling-dens she was known to
his accomplices by the nickname of “the dummy.” The lady was Countess
Told.
Throughout the meal he devoted himself to her, paying her every
possible attention, and relating to her eager ears tales of strange
and wonderful experiences in hazardous places, of the chase of wild
animals or of human beings in parts of the world that are little
frequented. He spoke with a grim earnestness, a savage unrestraint,
enjoying once more in recollection the powers he had exercised in such
circumstances. He realized what it was that drove this woman to the
gambling-dens, and it seemed as if this sudden disclosure gave him a
pang, as if there opened up within him a chasm and a gulf so deep that
only a palpitating human heart could fill it. With his imagination and
with his bold recital he was pursuing such a heart, as in the jungle he
had pursued the tiger. The hope of conquest inflamed his blood; he felt
he must make it his own.
It was this woman’s heart he wished to subjugate. He was consumed with
passionate desire as he read in her eyes how his recital fired her
blood. That was the kind of life she craved, and her nature understood
and responded to it. He painted wild scenes for her; he showed himself
struggling for conquest with body, soul and spirit pitted against
unrestrained nature, and he desired her to believe that this wild and
unrestrained nature was within her.
She trembled at his words, and, swayed by his ardour, a longing for
support and tenderness overcame her. The recitals by which he sought to
enchain her interest aroused so forceful an impression of human power
that it seemed, in tearing herself away from them, she was actually
tearing a fragment of living, bleeding flesh when she sought out
her husband with an almost supplicating gesture, as if desirous of
protection from a force too powerful to endure.
Mabuse saw her gesture, and the blood mounted to his forehead. He was
flushed with passionate desire, and could no longer bear to see the
glances of others rest upon her ... other strangers address her ... the
lips of other men pressed to her hand ... or the thought that any other
will should impose itself on her. His was the call of blood that should
reach her, and inflamed with passion and desire, he left the house and
drove home.
All his thoughts were centred on her, however, and as he rapidly
increased the distance between them, and as it were tore the bleeding
flesh from his body, he called out to the image which filled the
yearning gulf within him, “Death and desire! death and desire!”
At home he drank until all around him had dissolved in the mists of
intoxication, and he no longer saw anything but her heart, her bleeding
heart, snatched by his hand from her lovely body, held in his grasp,
enticing and inflaming his passion.
* * * * *
At length came the day when Countess Told should enter upon her prison
experiences. She repaired to Wenk’s chambers, and he took her to the
building, making the governor _au courant_ of the whole story. Before
being led to the cell, she asked, “How long am I to stay there?”
“As long as you like, Countess,” replied Wenk. “It all depends upon
your skill, but of course you have but to say the word and you are
free in an instant, even if you have not achieved your object.”
“I have plenty of time,” she answered, “but I should like to ask for
leave next Monday, so that I can keep an appointment.”
“Most certainly, we can easily arrange that. With your permission, I
will come and fetch you. Besides, you are sure to have something to
report by then!”
“Finally, Dr. Wenk,” said the Countess, “I want you to know that my
husband is in the secret, and you will go and see him, won’t you?
Promise me!”
Wenk assented. A warder took possession of the Countess, and as she
went with him she smiled back at Wenk. “Good luck!” cried he, ere she
vanished along the corridor.
* * * * *
The Countess had left the Privy Councillor’s house in a strange
tumult of feeling. The stranger who had so impressed her had suddenly
disappeared, but his forceful personality had left its mark, and she
could not free herself of it. This mysterious and compelling power
of his effaced the image of Wenk, and the latter receded into the
background.
When the door of the cell opened before her, it seemed as if the time
she had to spend in this narrow space, this strange, cold chamber, so
far removed from the world, would be a period of probation, a time of
testing for herself.
She was to see the stranger again on Monday. “I am asking your
neighbour at the supper-table next Monday for another sitting with
our medium,” the old Councillor had said to her with a mischievous
smile. “He must make up for lost time, because he was called away
unexpectedly. But if he did not see the medium asleep, at any rate he
found Countess Told awake!”
“All right! I shall be pleased to meet him again,” she had answered in
a friendly and noncommittal tone.
The door of the cell closed behind her, and she saw a figure seated on
a stool, but it did not turn round. “Well?” it said growlingly.
“Good morning,” said the Countess.
The dancer turned round slowly. When she at length faced the Countess,
the latter uttered a little cry, and with well-feigned astonishment
hastened to Cara, exclaiming, “What, _you_ here, my dear! But we know
each other! What a strange coincidence!”
She began chattering at once, as if quite oblivious of Cara’s sullen
mood. “Just imagine, they actually caught us all--at Schramm’s--the
most noted resort of them all! I can tell you there was a fine to-do,
my dear. One man sobbed, another tried to jump out of the window, and
you know they are all shut up tight! Somebody sat down and wailed,
‘Oh my wife, my four children, I am disgraced for ever!’ There was a
tremendous fluttering in the dovecot. I could not slip away in time,
and so they got me too! Tell me what is the best thing for me to do?
There’s nothing wrong in entering a gaming-house, and I have never once
played!”
But Cara only eyed her gloomily.
“Do say something. Is there anything the matter?” pleaded the Countess.
“The matter is that I want you to leave me alone,” answered the other.
“Was the young gentleman with the fair sandy beard there?”
“The one who played against Basch, you mean? No, he wasn’t there. I
have never seen him since that night.”
“Was the old Professor there?”
“No, I didn’t see him either.”
“Then you needn’t tell me any more about it; it doesn’t interest me.
The whole world isn’t worth a pin. I am miserable, for I am forsaken
and betrayed. There’s no interest left in life for me. I am lost and
undone, and no one troubles any more about me than if I were a frozen
field-mouse. What dirty dogs they are!”
Suddenly she sprang from her stool and seized the Countess by the
shoulders. “You were with the rest of us. I want to drum it into your
head,” she continued with increasing vehemence, “that there never was
anybody so treacherously betrayed as I have been. And there was no
reason for doing it, for I was an artiste, a well-known and admired
artiste, and here I am now, forsaken and betrayed! Cast aside like a
squeezed-out orange!”
“Why did he forsake you?” asked the Countess shyly. In her own mind
she seemed but a simple child in the presence of this wild and
passionate personality. Yes, he had forsaken her, left her for ever,
she reflected, and she shuddered at the thought. And now he was dead.
At the moment she felt doubtful of the enterprise she had undertaken.
“He is dead,” she said in a low voice which vibrated.
“Who?” cried Cara.
“Your friend ... Hull!” answered the Countess, preparing to enter
sympathetically into the girl’s feelings, the image of Wenk growing yet
fainter in her subconscious mind.
But the other exclaimed passionately, “What are you saying? The man I
mean is not dead; he is alive, and yet I sit here in prison. Yonder in
the town outside he stands, strong as a tower, firm as a rock, I tell
you! How can a puny thing like you know what he was? All others were
as dirt beneath his feet, and their faithlessness too small a trifle
to consider! Hull is dead, but what does _that_ matter? Who cares an
atom about _him_? But that other, the master, the lord, he lives there
in the free air, where there is light and love and life ... where he
might bear to have me lying at his feet, like a rug that only serves to
warm his toes. He is the great man, the lord, the master! He is a bear,
a lion, a royal Bengal tiger, do you hear? He does not belong to this
cold and frosty land; he comes from Bengal, from paradise, from a place
I shall never see again! And I--I--am left to linger in this dungeon!”
Suddenly she said, quite calmly and seriously, “Tell me, do you think
there are men whose will is so strong that they can break down even
these walls when they know how passionately I desire it?”
“There are no such men outside, but within us there are!” answered
the Countess, carried away by the vehemence of that passionate storm
of feeling which had so lately broken over her. How contemptible it
was of her, she thought, to have desired to outwit a human being. She
felt mean in her own estimation, and casting all projects and promises
to the winds, she began to glow in the presence of this strange
personality like the spark of an electric current. “Yes, they are to be
found in us!” she repeated.
“He! he! the conqueror!” sang Cara, with a sound of passion in her
tone, and in the Countess’s heart, too, there sprang up, like a marble
image, the form of the man she had met a few evenings before. On her
heart this image was sculptured, and she allowed its impress to recur
again and again and remain there.
“Do you love him?” she asked the dancer.
But the other answered, as if brushing away an unconsidered trifle, “I
... love? I _adore_ him!”
“I do not love him!” hastily asseverated the Countess, pursuing the
mental image she had conjured up. “But yet he is great, superhuman. He
is a world in himself. In the midst of this tame and quiet existence
he is as a jungle and primeval forest. It seems to me as if he must
have both the tiger and the serpent within him, as well as all that
is boldest in Nature, its gigantic trees, its wild and impenetrable
forests. Do you know, one can creep within them, never coming to an
end, and yet be in him!”
She broke off suddenly. She dared not put into words the fancies evoked
within her. For the husband whose eccentricities she tolerated was no
more to her than a brother--nay, a father. They were bound together by
one voluptuous hour of which no human being knew or even suspected. It
was such an hour as that in which two human personalities melted into
one to create a new being that later on might emerge and begin a life
bound by invisible ties to that mysterious hour. The threads might be
torn from their place, snapped, distorted, yet they remained entwined.